The Publishing SEEN
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Lord Baltimore Hotel
Hanover Suite B – Mezzanine
PARKING
Download a map here.
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For this 90-minute craft intensive, publishers and editors join a successful self-published author to discuss the publishing scene, best practices, and ways writers should prepare their work for a competitive market. Each ‘house’ – whether an independent press, literary journal, or novelist offers tips for getting work noticed, from the slush pile into an editor’s hands. They’ll share the process and timeline from manuscript to finished product. Prepare for a frank talk on what these professionals see, what they want, and what strikes them as the best way to claim an editor’s attention. An audience Q&A will follow. Sylvia Jones’ first poetry collection, Television Fathers, was released in 2024 from Meekling Press. She is an editor at Black Lawrence Press and a reader for Ploughshares. J. Hawki is the self-published author of a psychological thriller series and a standalone work of literary historical fiction. She is completing a bio-narrative work and has started a dystopian work set in a not-too-distant future. Dora Malech is the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review and a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her fifth book of poetry, Trying × Trying, is forthcoming this fall. Sarah Daniels is the new publisher and executive director of Mason Jar Press. She writes fiction under the pseudonym Persephone King. Casey Plett is the publisher at LittlePuss Press and the author of On Community, A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love. Moderator Annie Marhefka’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. She has received awards and fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council, Tin House, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and the Gullkistan Center for the Arts, and she serves as executive director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a nonprofit empowering women-identifying writers.
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Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist whose debut collection, Television Fathers, ”is a sublime alchemy of the senses, an illumination of how relatable the most potent memories are through Jones’ singular voice,” writes Jennifer Baker, editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life. Sylvia currently serves as an editor at Black Lawrence Press and a reader for Ploughshares. Last year, on behalf of the Goucher Prison Education Partnership, she led a summer intro to poetry workshop in Jessup, MD. She has received fellowship and support from the Peaked Hill Trust; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Walters Museum, Topical Cream; Jack Straw Cultural Center; The Emerging Artist Initiative; OUTWrite DC; Poets at the End of The World Collective; Literary Cleveland; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Bucknell University, where she was a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. Her writing appears in R&R Journal, Smartish Pace, Sprung Formal, Revolute, DIAGRAM, the Hopkins Review, Poet Lore, Spilt Milk by the Poetry Society of New York, Shenandoah, and the Cortland Review.
www.english.columbian.gwu.edu/sylvia-jones
Instagram: @sylviajonesjonesjonesjones
Post-retirement from a career in health care management, J. Hawki began writing full time, creating two suspenseful psychological thrillers, Elephants and Chopping Blocks Retain Their Natural Color and its exciting sequel, Catch an Elephant by the Tail. The third book in this series, No Holes for Elephants, was released in October 2024. In 2020, Dreams of the Dead was published as a work of literary historical fiction with mystical undertones. She is currently working on a bio-narrative work about her son, Michael’s struggle with a rare illness titled, You Never Know What’s Coming, and has started writing a dystopian novel called In a Green Tree. J. Hawki lives with her family in Harford County and is a member of the Black Writer’s Guild of Maryland.
authorjhawki.com
Instagram: @authorjhawki
Dora Malech’s most recent book of poetry is Flourish, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2020. “Here is poetry that is unafraid to see us clearly. In this time of injustice, what can one poet do? How can that one ‘pair of wings on fire’ lift us out of our predicament? Open this book to find out,” writes Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic. CMUP will publish her fifth book of poetry, Trying × Trying, in Fall 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. With Gabriella Fee, she translated Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s debut collection, Dolore Minimo, which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize. Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among other honors. She is the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.
doramalech.net
X: @DoraMalech
Instagram: @DoraMalech
Sarah Daniels is the publisher and executive director of Mason Jar Press. She is a former newspaper reporter and holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore, where she teaches writing to undergraduates, high school students, and the incarcerated. Her fiction has appeared in the Rappahannock Review and Coffin Bell under her pseudonym Persephone King.
https://persephoneking.com
http://masonjarpress.com
X: @masonjarpress / @king_persephone
Instagram: @masonjarpress / @persephonekingwriter
Casey Plett is the author of On Community, A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has called many places home but nowhere more so than Winnipeg and Southern Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory. She is one of those gross people who likes the smell of cigarette smoke, and she is an Assistant Professor of English and Film at Ohio University.
www.caseyplett.com
Instagram: @plettsky
Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore whose publications have appeared in Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, Lunch Ticket, and more. She is the winner of the 2024 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize, and her work was featured on The Slowdown Show. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit empowering women-identifying writers. Annie is working on several nonfiction projects with support from the Maryland State Arts Council, Gullkistan Center for the Arts, Tin House, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. She has a BA in creative writing from Washington College and an MBA and is an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. Follow Annie on Instagram @anniemarhefka and at anniemarhefka.com. When Annie is not writing, she is usually trying to find her way back to the water.
www.anniemarhefka.com
Instagram: @anniemarhefka
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CityLit Project in partnership with Lord Baltimore Hotel and Red Emma’s present CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future. This celebration of the arts showcases a bevy of leading poets and writers on April 5, 2025. We’re talking fiction, nonfiction, poetry galore, and ways to up the ante on your craft.
Download the CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future flyer.